After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year.
Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.
At CES 2026:
- Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad
- Unihertz also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.
[T]wo QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.
Never had any of my phones with keyboards have a mechanical failure. I can type blindly on a physical keyboard, not so with an OSD one. Does the tap register? Does it predict into the right word? Who knows.
I can blindly type with an on screen keyboard, it’s not that hard. What’s wrong with your phone where taps aren’t registering? And poor text prediction would be the same on physical vs on screen KB.
My old Pantrch Duo would frequently ignore physical key presses where it tactically clicked, but failed to actually bottom out enough to register. And I have that issue all the time with mechanical keyboards where the tactile bump happens before the key actually gets registered. Not an issue for typing, but for gaming I do it often.
You can type a full actual sentence on an OSD keyboard including punctuation without looking at it?
Yeah. It’s not that hard.
I just did with that.
Also what are you typing blindly where punctuation actually matters?